Come Sail Away IC Inbox

[crushed_pearls]

Erin's voice mail message is in a weary voice: "Erin Peters. If you called in the middle of the night and I didn't answer, I'm dying. If I pick up and someone on your end isn't dying, they will be shortly. Text otherwise."

Comments

[decrypter]

She has no doubt Erin would do that, and it's why she ends up laughing out loud, temporarily freed of the doubts that plagued her. It helps, to be able to laugh even after all that.

"You can't do it for too long - what if the wrong person tried to play you -"

And then she laughs again, because she just thought about the Erin-trumpet shrieking at the idea.

[crushed_pearls]

"My defense against this," Erin says in a Sage Voice Of Wisdom (patent pending), "is to point out that to play me they'd need to be literally kissing my ass."

[decrypter]

It's not fair, to make her laugh like that. It's not fair at all, but she's helpless against it, and her thoughts from before are swept away in a tide of just laughing at how stupid it all is - sometimes you just need something completely different. And she's trying to regain composure, she really is, but she keeps giggling, calming down and then having to breathe very slow to come back to herself.

If Erin says anything else it's liable to set her off again.

[crushed_pearls]

Oh Erin's not going to say anything.

She turns her head into a trumpet and doors out a series of notes that sound like 'kiss my assssss', holding the last one for a bit, before turning her head back to normal.

[decrypter]

If she could protest, she would, but instead she just dissolves, hands over her face, feeling the tears at the corners of her eyes. Her stomach hurts, but she hardly cares, because it's just funny, wringing out all the tension she's been carrying around all day.

Slow breaths. Slow, shaky breaths. It's not that funny. It is that funny. She's going to die right here of laughter and Erin will be her murderer.

We must slay her

[crushed_pearls]

"You good there lass? Or have I proven to be your...doot?"

Should Erin be trying to murder her roommate with comedy alone? No. Would it be the best murder in the history of this voyage? Yes.

[serialskiller]

A moment later, from the direction of a cabin familiar to both of them: a strangled, squeaky sound that might be an attempt to play 'fuuuuuck you'.

Not here

[takethatnature]

From the vantage point of cabin 124, located in between 134 and 119, those squawky trumpet noises going back and forth sound kind of like someone imitating Wilson's voice.

[decrypter]

The pun would have been bad enough, but she hears the squeak of the sound and it's over again. She has to shove her face into her pillow to not shriek loudly, barely managing to breathe. If she wasn't lying down already, she'd have had to sit down on the floor. If it's possible to laugh while you breathe, she's doing it, and if anyone needs her for anything else, impossible.

She'll survive, but barely.

[crushed_pearls]

Erin settles back down, chuckling quietly to herself, and waits for Helena to remember how to breathe air with her human lungs.

Then, softly: "So. Twenty years, eh?"

[decrypter]

Coming back to the land of the living, she breathes slow, wiping the tears from her eyes, but she has a smile on, flopped fully on her bed like a starfish would be.

"What about them?"

[crushed_pearls]

"Well y'see I can't help but notice you were nineteen when you got here so unless the doot I have laid upon you is so all-consuming that it retroactively aged you, someone had a birthday she didn't tell me about."

[decrypter]

"...You never asked when it was."

Because that will save her, totally.

[crushed_pearls]

"I can, and will, text Security to ask for a trumpet duet."

The threats this boat has produced.

[decrypter]

She sits up immediately.

"Don't you dare. I may have had a birthday, but I didn't do anything to deserve that."

[crushed_pearls]

"Then why didn't ya tell me?" The question is very soft, and a touch hurt.

[decrypter]

"...because that day, there was a lot of bad news for you to process, and I preferred to divert your mind rather than saying something that felt like demanding your attention on me. And before you say anything, I didn't want to tell anyone, because I didn't want to curse the day and bring something unfortunate down. Call me foolish, but I thought without attention, the day had the best chance of being peaceful."

She exhales quietly, remembering all the paper flowers she had folded, each with that wish for a calm day.

"Only one other person in this entire ship knows it happened, and it's not for lack of wanting to tell you." A tiny, tiny pause. "January thirteenth."

[crushed_pearls]

"Well. Happy birthday, Helena, and congrats." Erin sighs deeply from her bed. "...I don't remember my proper birthday but I celebrate my Homecoming on November seventeenth. If we're all still around then, bully me relentlessly for being old as fuck."

[decrypter]

"I'll be around then just to spite you."

It holds no teeth, a kitten's play bite of a threat.

"...For what it's worth, Erin, I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier."

That's even softer, and she knows that Erin might be able to discern where it comes from. Even in a place like this, she hasn't yet lost that reflex to not be bothersome. To be calm and sweet and palatable to everyone, even at her own expense. Surviving, that way.

[crushed_pearls]

"I won't ride you about it lass. It'd just be the conversation we finished having all over again. It's just..." Erin sighs, wistful, frustrated. "...It's so odd to me that you know to defend your worth if some dipshit assumes you're crippled but the moment it seems like someone might love or cherish you suddenly you act like you're not worth the trouble."

[decrypter]

Cherish. She's glad Erin is lying on her bed and can't see the way Helena turns her head away so that she can smile a little to herself. Instead, she knows there's a question there, one she might try to answer.

"...That's not it. It's more that worse things need to be handled first - they're greater priority. I know not to be selfish when someone else is hurting, when something bad has happened. My conscience simply wouldn't allow it. I can hold on, and wait for the worse things to clear. I have the patience, but the things that hurt...they don't wait."

[crushed_pearls]

"Helena, little bird...you got a doctorate you been hiding from me?"

She's going somewhere with this.

[decrypter]

"No. I knew a doctor, though."

She still thinks about her, occasionally. Warm, gentle hands, and smelling like antiseptic, exhaustion in her voice. Dr. Dyer was a good soul.

[crushed_pearls]

"Then it's not on you to run triage for the world, and especially not at the cost of your own needs. It's one thing when we're in an emergency, I'll hear out that you didn't get your broken foot seen to because someone else has a stab wound, but..." That sigh again. "Not every time is go time, little bird. I been telling people this, maybe you'll be the first one to hear it and listen: if you want a peaceful life you gotta learn to live one, like, actively. It's a skill as much as survival or swordsmanship or swimming. When d'ya think you wanna get started on that? 'cause...I'm trying to learn it now."

[decrypter]

She's quiet for a moment, letting that sink in. There's a peaceful life, but then there's so many people saying that such a life can't be found here, reminding of dangers. There's good things, and there's bodies and the scent of blood. There's a caging, and there's freedom. Every day, another number in her record.

"...if I get too involved in a peaceful life, what will happen when the next horror comes?"

That is the center of it.